Summer didn't come slowly down. It didn't crawl like a fog to settle. It came with bees. Bees suckling the flowers. Bees fussing and fumbling and eating at flowers. No not like a hurricane. Not like that. Not noisily either. Just softly down. Like rain dribbling on trees. Sun settled into summer and summer became.
First, it was the mangoes. Eating them in the sunshine was as if these were the nicest mangoes we had ever eaten or would ever eat. Mango juice dribbling down on to our fingers. Down our throats with sugar. Sugar-coated tongues refused sweet potato meals and codfish that melt in the mouth. We ate each mango down to the seed and rejoiced in the new-found freedom of mango juice on our yard dresses, messy fingers at meals and sweet talk under the mango trees. The lovely yellow fruit that trickled like a river and announced the sure coming of the joy times.
Hard times sometimes came with the summer heat and morning after morning we crept down to the kitchen thatched and large and warm with the summer fire to taste Esmie's crisp new bammies and hot cawfee tea. Cawfee tea so sweet it licked our tongues and remind us of grater cake and long white candies with the red swirls that Daddy and Mama bought in town and brought back for us on those rare occasions when we were left to fend for ourselves with Esmie becoming Mama for the day.
Summer came too with pimento berries. Picking at branches under the trees, seeking out green lizards and the praying mantis and listening to stories of the green lizard that crawled up a man's foot to settle under the dirty grey cloth of his pants and decided to remain. We heard stories of visiting Arab men who worked magic and of obeah men of the dark old days of 10 or 20 years ago when the world was young and we were not yet in it. Then after picking pimento we had to pick out the ripe berries to make the sweet dram that came in for Christmas and leave the green spicy smelling ones for the barbecue that lay over the tank. There, the berries would dry softly and we would, day after day, find ourselves on the barbecue sweeping and fussing the berries into large crocus bags till it was time to clean them and sell them.
We forgot the horrors of school. But we had in the early summers of our lives to read for Mama and Daddy the short lines that told of elephants and monkeys and the plight of the flying fish. A gentle tap on our fingers would show us the right word.
Sometimes we cried when the word was hard, but we read for half an hour each and knew the heavy business of hard work, tears, and the joy of knowing letters, then words oozing into sentences like soft mud on our toes, nice and easy and delicious.
What wild whoopees summers brought to the hills around the yellow cut-stone house. What lovely hide and seek tales and delicious little dolly pots of several lizard tails cooked in to leftover food and dirt. What a joy to see the dolls' mouths and see the sweet peppermint flavoured water trickle into dolls' mouths and then to see them sleep in contentment after we patted them dry, burped them and then retired to find some other plaything to relieve us just a short while from the joys of motherhood and knowing.
Then it was guava time. That meant guava cups and guava jelly time. It also meant guava juice time and the times when the seeds ate on to our teeth and frightened us of another dental visit. It meant climbing trees and settling down to devour endless guavas. We spat the skin out and bit deep. Then we remembered that it was Mama who sent us to gather them not just to eat them as they were. With trees of guavas around us and yearning tongues to taste how could we be expected to remember the whip and the bedtime punishment? For though we hated the whip it was a hundred times better than the bedtime in broad daylight when the sun was shining high in the sky and the hens were cackling.
For we also loved to track down the hens and steal the eggs as they laid them. Where did they lay them? In the ping-wing bush close to the macca tree. Smart hens. It meant some prickles under the skins as we crept close. But we found them before the wily mongoose did. We justified the theft of the hens' secrets with the fact that we fed them and housed them and therefore we ought at least to eat from them. And we loved those eggs. Small light brown or white eggs that made our mouths water when fried or scrambled. Lovely hard-boiled and absolutely wonderful when made with cake batter and made into pound cakes, sweet and soft enough for our palates.
Summer came with the sea. Usually it was just one trip. We travelled in the old black jalopy of a car, as we counter mileposts and screamed out our excitement. Then with considerable relief, our father landed on the black sand beach and we poured out like passengers from an aeroplane wreck.
We stripped ourselves of our scanty clothing down to our bathing suits and then stepped warily at first through the sand full of fish bones to the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea that stretched out in front of us. Slowly at first, we eased in rather than sprang in to splash and dabble rather than to taunt the others. Then we screamed and we wet each other gleefully from head to toe. In later summers I took no part in such unladylike games and my straightened hair cost money to do and who knows? Maybe it was true that salt spoilt my lovely hairdo.
Then after a mighty splash it was time to wait for the canoes. They came into shore as fish growing larger as they came. They were peopled by long hard men who knew the waters like the back of their hands, men whose calloused fingers told the tales of nets and salt, but we knew that these were men who wept when a fellow fisherman was lost at sea, men who knew long anxious nights and whose fingers knew the curve of the lanterns, whose fingers knew how to kill and gut a fish. These fishermen stepped out like kings whose power lay in their own hands and their mastery of the sea and its ways, not in the glory of their birth.
We bought fish and cleaned them. We built a fire and roasted some. We ate with our fingers and licked the taste, drank lemonade that had grown hot in the heat, and bammies that threatened to choke, so full of starch they were and then we lay back to squint at the declining sun, squint with anxiety because soon it would be time to go.
Back to the yellow cut-stone house on the hill with the fowls fussing in the sweetsop tree behind the house and the birds, the surrounding trees rivalling them in the fuss, back to the days of smoked or corned fish, days of sweet smells from the creng creng that hung lopsided over the fire and days of remembering and hoping.
Summer. Older summers did not leave without dreams. As we ate deep into books that told the lives of the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew and Enid Blyton and Hardy Boys books with longing and we almost hated ourselves. For we had never solved a mystery or ridden in an aeroplane; we had never eaten ice cream made from snow and we had never tasted maple syrup let alone tap the maple tree and watched the sap trickle down into buckets. Instead, we were the Dinahs that cooked for Honey Bunch, whose speech was never quite right. We were the children of the negress who could not sit in a restaurant with Nancy. We were the Enid Blyton golliwogs, the not-quite-finished folks who sang and danced and were lazy and happy and free loving. Then it was time to know ourselves and we grieved because there was no one to tell us the truth of who we really were.
Summers were happy times. But they were also testing times. We lengthened with the days and our feet grew out our shoes. Before school came back in our minds it would be time to try on the old uniforms to see whether they still fit and the money that came from pimento sales would give us new ones if they didn't. And each of us get a new church dress to ease our pain and maybe, just maybe ... we got new shoes.
